Month: December 2018

Days after Iran unveiled its first stealth destroyer in a televised ceremony on Saturday which saw the warship launched into operation in the Persian Gulf, and after the US condemned Iran’s test firing a medium-range nuclear capable ballistic missile on Sunday, Pentagon officials have announced the U.S. is sending an aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf in a show of force against Iran. 

US officials told the Wall Street Journal the USS John C. Stennis and support ships will arrive in the Middle East “within days” — which will bring a close what’s been described as the longest period in two decades that a carrier group was absent from the region. Specifically the unnamed officials identified the purpose as to “exhibit a show of force against Iran” at a moment tensions are soaring after Nov. 4 renewed sanctions targeting Iran’s energy sector. The White House has vowed that it will work with international allies to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero in continuing economic warfare that could easily spark direct military confrontation. 

The WSJ reports:

The Stennis is scheduled to remain in the region for about two months, the officials said, spending most of that time in the Persian Gulf. Its presence “certainly provides a deterrence” against any potentially hostile Iranian activity in the region’s waters, one of the officials said.

Responding to the unprecedented sanctions regimen after President Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 JCPOA, Iran’s military leadership has over the past months issued a counter threat of blockading the vital Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, which would strangle global oil shipping. The US carrier presence inches the world closer to witnessing a major flare up in the gulf which could send the price of oil soaring. 

In early November, for example, a prominent hardline cleric told a Friday prayer gathering in Mashhad, considered Iran’s spiritual capital, that Iran has the power to “instantly” create conditions for $400 a barrel oil prices if it decides to act in the Persian Gulf. 

Shia cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda grabbed headlines at the time by declaring, “If Iran decides, a single drop of this region’s oil will not be exported and in 90 minutes all Persian Gulf countries will be destroyed.”

It appears the presence of the USS John C. Stennis is designed to prevent such a possibility from happening. Officials also said the carrier group will support the US war in Afghanistan as well as operations against remnant ISIS pockets in Iraq and Syria. But despite current tensions with Iran, Pentagon officials have underscored that the carrier mission was previously scheduled, while also touting its Iranian deterrent mission. 

In recent comments over Iran’s developing ballistic missile program, the State Department’s special representative on Iran, Brian Hook, said the “military option” is on the table. 

“We have been very clear with the Iranian regime that we will not hesitate to use military force when our interests are threatened. I think they understand that. I think they understand that very clearly,” Hook said late last week.

“I think right now, while we have the military option on the table, our preference is to use all of the tools that are at our disposal diplomatically,” he added.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PgU7Mz Tyler Durden

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,

If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay…

Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being.

Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … well, it’s a story, essentially. It’s whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history (“we” being the majority of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but the majority of people pretend they don’t in order to be able to get by in the system, which punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically, to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.

I’ll return to this point a little later.

First, let’s look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing “truth.” I’m going to use The Guardian‘s most recent blatantly fabricated article (“Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy“) as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by “respectable” outlets over the course of the last two years. The “Russian Propaganda Peddlers” story. The “Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton” story. The “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story. The “Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape” story. The “Novichok Assassins” story. The “Bana Alabed Speaks Out” story. The “Trump’s Secret Russian Server” story. The “Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis” story. The “Russians Orchestrated Brexit” story. The “Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms” story. The “Twitter Bots” story. And the list goes on.

I’m not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook, Craig Murray, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, and many others). The short version is, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed “Russians”) on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding’s earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardianprominently featured and flogged, were based on … well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous “intelligence sources.” After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.

By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other “respectable,” “authoritative” outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piecespeculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian‘s story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump … well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and “leftists” who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.

At this point, I imagine you’re probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing “truth.” Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie … a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the “truth” thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes’ lies). Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here is why.

Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that “truth” is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

Nor are there many truths (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one truth … the official truth. The truth according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of “truth” was invented (i.e., to render any other “truths” lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some “objective truth” (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger’s dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn’t. The truth is just a story … a story that is never our story.

The truth is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else’s story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the truth of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their “truth” as heresy. They regard their “truth” as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.

For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or “fearless adversarial” outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.

Or … all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian, or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can’t afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.

Look, I’m not trying to argue that it isn’t important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that “the truth” is not going to “rouse the masses from their slumber” and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly “wake up,” “see the truth” and start “the revolution.” People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardianregarding this story.

As for Julian Assange, I’m afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn’t left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can’t have heretics of Assange’s notoriety running around punching holes in their “truth” and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.

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Do President Trump’s tweets praising allies like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort for not “flipping” and cooperating with the Mueller probe constitute witness tampering? Well, Bob Mueller certainly hasn’t offered any indication that he’s pursuing that line of inquiry. But that hasn’t stopped one prominent Trump critic – and husband of one of the president’s closest advisors – from suggesting as much.

George Conway, the lawyer who turned down/was denied a senior position in Trump’s Department of Justice, tweeted on Monday that Trump’s latest tweet praising former campaign worker Roger Stone for not cooperating with Mueller might violate a federal statute governing tampering and obstruction of justice.

“File under ’18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512,'” Conway tweeted, which is a reference to the statutes for obstruction of justice and tampering with witnesses, as the Hill pointed out.

File under “18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512” https://t.co/e4ZGVn1kJi

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) December 3, 2018

In the tweet (quoted by Conway), Trump was apparently reference an interview given by Stone over the weekend where the veteran political operative said he wouldn’t testify against Trump because it would mean he would need to “make things up.”

One Conway’s former op-ed collaborators, Neal Katyal, (who also once served as acting solicitor general during the Obama administration) appeared to agree with Conway’s assessment.

“This is genuinely looking like witness tampering,” he tweeted. “DOJ (at least with a nonfake AG) prosecutes cases like these all the time. The fact it’s done out in the open is no defense.”

George is right. This is genuinely looking like witness tampering. DOJ (at least with a nonfake AG) prosecutes cases like these all the time. The fact it’s done out in the open is no defense. Trump is genuinely melting down, and no good lawyer can represent him under these circs https://t.co/zqFUoQvWTf

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) December 3, 2018

As did Bloomberg Opinion Editor (and perennial Trump nemesis) Tim O’Brien, when he wrote in a Monday column that Trump’s twitter feed was rife with evidence of ‘misconduct’.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed — awash in daily musings, threats, cajoling, criticism and flagrant meddling in a federal investigation — is a font of information and evidence for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

Monday’s Twitter installment from the president sure looks like what any vigilant prosecutor might construe as “witness tampering.”

Trump persistent bashing of Michael Cohen, his former attorney, and Mueller himself have also been criticized as verging on a violation of the witness tampering statute. But then again, the notion that praising an individual simply for being truthful with investigators is somehow a criminal act could be construed as illegal and possible grounds for impeach seems like a stretch. But then again, we’re not the lawyers here. 

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Via RedState

If you aren’t familiar with his work, independent journalist Andy Ngo has made something of a career out of chronicling the outright douchebaggery of the the antifa movement and the coziness of the Portland and Seattle governments with that movement. His efforts have discomfited the antifa and irritated politicians. And, along the way, it has given all of us a view of what happens when a governmental entity stops trying to enforce laws equally and decides that supporting a violent and extreme political faction is the way to gain popularity.

Yesterday, a group called the Three Percenters has a permit for a rally in Seattle. They were met by the antifa who didn’t bother to obtain a permit, though the police don’t really seem to care.

Today, around 150 self-described anti-fascists protested a downtown Seattle rally by the Washington State 3 Percent, a conservative group that calls itself constitutionalist. Antifa proudly displayed the red flag of communism on their side. pic.twitter.com/5xLVWlpKgW

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

The trouble starts as Ngo is recognized.

When I tried to walk to the street corner where antifa was demonstrating, two of their people with guns confronted me. pic.twitter.com/C5IrlnQqQ8

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

Washington is an open-carry state but the context of the open-carry here seems to me (and IANAL) to clearly be to intimidate (see 0:34):

RCW 9.41.270 provides that it is unlawful for a person to carry, exhibit, display or draw any firearm in a manner, under circumstances, and at a time and place that either manifests intent to intimidate another or that warrants alarm for the safety of other persons. A violation is a gross misdemeanor.

The article at the link points to Washington court cases that have upheld arrests for open carry that didn’t involve crimes but could disquiet the average person, like walking down a sidewalk holding a pistol in your hand.

There are two interesting things that happen in this segment. First, Ngo is headed off by two antifa carrying what appear to be some civilian knockoff of the M-4 and they tell him they will not let him pass. Then a cop intervenes and tells them to let Ngo through. The cop is less that six feet from the armed antifa, he seemingly heard them tell Ngo he couldn’t pass but somehow the blocking of passage on a sidewalk and the possession of a pair of semi-automatic rifles are never linked into one act.

Then the situation starts to deteriorate for Ngo:

They surrounded me, and on cue, all of them took out their cameras to record. They pushed me and followed me when I tried to leave the area I was boxed in. One @SeattlePD officer tried to stand up for me. pic.twitter.com/ghJXoNQOqm

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

A woman screamed into a bullhorn in front of my face. I was pressed up against a barrier. She led the mob into called me a “Nazi.” It was so loud that I felt physical pain in my ear drums. pic.twitter.com/0C8Ny16nQH

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

Then the Seattle PD decided to say “f*** that Constitution bullsh**” and took the side of the antifa, threatening Ngo with arrest for “inciting conflict.” One unarmed guy with a camera was to blame. Go figure.

This was a surreal moment: @SeattlePD officer came up and said I was “inciting conflict” and potential violence just by being there. If my physical presence in a public space makes someone else want to become violent, the problem is not with me. pic.twitter.com/08wM5KXwx0

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

 And when the death threat came, Ngo left.

“I’m known to do this shit for real,” an antifa protester said to me. “Are you willing to die for Youtube shit?…Death is coming to you.” pic.twitter.com/bhK2wWkMBD

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 2, 2018

Sort of amazing, really. The Seattle PD had zero problem with armed people showing up for an un-permitted protest. They had zero problem with a sidewalk being obstructed or a journalist being rather unambiguously threatened. And rather than enforce the law the told a guy engaging in Constitutionally protected behavior–covering this illegal demonstration as a journalist–that he was the problem.

This kind of gutlessness by the police and sympathetic treatment of these thugs by various governmental bodies is going to inevitably lead to violence and bloodshed. Maybe when these masked Starbucks employees are stacked up like cordwood in the streets, someone will decide that the law should be enforced.

 

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Camden’s abandoned baseball stadium, once celebrated by local officials as a new beginning for the city’s waterfront, will soon be demolished and replaced with three Rutgers University athletic fields.

Here is the problem: the Camden County Improvement Authority approved a $1 million contract this month to demolish the 17-year-old stadium after $21 million in taxpayers dollars built the structure for an independent minor league baseball team as hopes it would draw economic development to the area.

According to NJ.com, Rutgers’ board of governors and Camden city officials are expected to raise $15 million, $7.5 million apiece, to redevelop the plot of land into a multi-field sports arena for the university’s Division III sports teams.

Demolition work is expected to start this month and could take up to three months to complete. A city spokesman said items such as seats other pieces of the ballpark will be salvaged.

“There is no doubt in my mind that it will be sad to see the stadium go, but the redevelopment of those acres will create an amenity and asset open to all for perpetuity,” Louis Cappelli, Camden County freeholder director said in a statement.

“…This will be the single best investment for Camden’s youth athletic infrastructure in the modern era.”

Cappelli’s statement is very similar to city officials’ about two decades ago, who managed to swindle $21 million from taxpayers to build the stadium. 

At a groundbreaking ceremony in 1999, Gov. Christie Whitman said the “partners” behind the stadium “have heard the message from the movie Field of Dreams: ‘If you build it, they will come.'”

However, that was not the case.

The goal in the early 2000s was to redevelop the Camden waterfront into an economic zone, but it has since been a financial disaster, all at the expense of the taxpayer. 

“Unfortunately, the state, in its lack of wisdom, built a baseball stadium for an unaffiliated, independent league (team) that folded and $35 million disappeared,” South Jersey political powerbroker George Norcross III said in 2017.

Just like the government and or central banks, New Jersey officials will keep throwing money into the pit, hoping that something sticks. 

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Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The Ghost Of Christmas Present

Apparently one additional world leader turned up in Buenos Aires without fanfare this weekend. The General Secretary of the North Pole, known popularly as Santa Claus, took his latest-model hypersonic sleigh to the G-20 Meeting, and made sure that the global financial elite would find their Christmas stockings stuffed with sugarplums one last time before the great reflation bull market dies of incredulity.

Something drastic was required as so many enterprises were skidding into a ditch last month, especially FAANGs, cars, house sales, and oil, while the Grand Old Man of the Dow Jones, General Electric, was singing its death song like an old Arikara chief in the prairie twilight. The US threat of 25 percent tariffs on Chinese exports was shunted ahead 90 days, giving the almighty algos and their human errand boys one last shot at looting the future.

How exactly will this change the basic equation of China sending its industrial output to WalMart in exchange for American IOUs, while the trade deficit mounts ever-higher and the last holdouts of the US middle class sink into debt, addiction, and hopelessness? It won’t, of course, because Americans have to find another reason to get up in the morning besides reporting to the national demolition derby. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t warm my heart to hear about x-hundred thousand “housing starts” every month, knowing that it represents the destruction of x-thousand acres of meadow, field, and forest, and that what’s being laid down on the landscape out there is soul-crushing infrastructure with no future.

It’s not hard to see why US life expectancy is going down, driven by the two new leading causes of death: opiate drugs and suicide — the former often in the service of the latter. The citizens of this land have exchanged just about everything that makes life worth living for the paltry rewards of “bargain shopping” and happy motoring. But the worst sacrifice is the loss of any sense of community, of face-to-face human transactions with people you know, people who have duties and obligations to one another that can be successfully enacted and fulfilled. Instead, you get to do all your business with robots, even including the robots fronting for companies that seek to ruin you. “Your call is important to us,” says the telephone robot at the hospital billing office dunning you to fork over $7,000 for the three stitches Little Skippy got when his best friend flew the drone into his forehead. “Please hold for the next available representative.” Who wouldn’t want to shoot themselves?

Interestingly, it’s the people of France who are going apeshit at this moment in history and not the much more beaten-down Americans. For all the deformities of the EU, France still maintains a general quality-of-life so far above what is found in the US these days that we look like some left-behind evolutionary dead end here in this wilderness of strip-malls and muffler shops. They live in towns and cities that are designed to bring people together in public. They support small business in spite of the diktats of Brussels. They maintain an interest in doing things well for its own sake. The French are rioting these days not simply over the cost of diesel fuel but because they’ve had enough impingements on their traditional ways of life and seek to arrest the losses.

Americans, by contrast, seem to passively accept their new status as world-class losers. You can deprive them of whatever is meaningful, whatever makes life worth living, and sell them depressing simulacra to replace those things, and they never notice. Even the revolts ongoing in this land only seek to make relations between us worse, for instance the new super-Puritanism that wants to criminalize the most elementary mating ceremonies, like asking for date, or even paying attention to someone of the opposite sex. This is what the Democratic Party, formerly the party of the working people, has dedicated itself to all year. That’s your “Resistance.” They’ve managed to ruin one of the few consolations for being on this planet.

Maybe you’all have had enough of that foolishness. Maybe when Christmas is over something will turn in that old proverbial widening gyre, and the anarchy loosened by that turn will not be “mere.”

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A recently introduced bill in the New Jersey senate would allow the state’s nearly half-million illegal aliens of driving age to get a driver’s license, according to NJ.com. 

“Offering undocumented immigrants a pathway to a legal drivers’ license would reduce their chances of encountering legal troubles while trying to make a living, while also making the roads safer for all New Jerseyans,” said State Senator Teresa Ruiz (D) in a statement to NJ. 

The bill, introduced by a handful of state legislators last week, would create two types of licenses; a “standard license” for undocumented immigrants, and a “REAL ID” license for legal residents. Licenses for illegals would only serve as ID cards and driver’s licenses and would not allow for state services or voting. 

“We can’t ignore the reality that undocumented immigrants are on the roads now, going to work, driving their children to school and doing the routine activities that all families do,” said one of the bill’s sponsors, state Sen. Joseph Vitale (D), adding “If they don’t have a driver’s license, don’t have insurance and are driving a vehicle that isn’t registered, it creates a hazard on the road.” 

“If you get in an accident with them, the damage may not be covered. This will improve roadway safety, be good for the economy and allow undocumented residents to support themselves and their families.”

New Jersey would join twelve other states which currently allow illegal immigrants to drive; California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have similar laws. 

“You don’t have options unless you take two or three buses to get to a job,” said Cecilia, a 50-year-old illegal alien living in Mercer County. “You always feel when you go out of your house, you pray to God the police doesn’t stop you for any reason or you are not involved in any accident.”

The new bill in New Jersey has wide support among Democrats according to the Inquirer, with both Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and Senate President Steve Sweeny supporting the legislation. Similar bills have appeared in New Jersey legislature over the last dozen or so years, however advocates say they are hopeful of its passage with the Democrat-majority state government. 

Early next year, Philadelphia officials plan to begin issuing municipal identification cards, for which all Philadelphia residents — including undocumented immigrants — will be eligible. Cities such as Newark, N.J., New York, and Chicago offer municipal IDs, which city officials say also benefit low-income residents and youth who can’t get state identification.

New Jersey Senate President Pro Tempore M. Teresa Ruiz, a cosponsor of the bill who has also supported past versions, said in a statement that the “countless undocumented immigrants who pay taxes and go to work every day in New Jersey” are “mothers and fathers striving to make a better life for their children and contributing to the economic growth of their communities.” –Philly

State Assemblywoman Annette Quijano – a Union County Democrat and that chamber’s majority leader, is anticipated to sponsor a companion bill over the next few weeks. 

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Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,

For the first few hours after any new “bombshell” Russiagate story comes out, my social media notifications always light up with poorly written posts by liberal establishment loyalists saying things like “HAHAHA @caitoz this proves you wrong now will you FINALLY stop denying Russian collusion???”

Then, when people start actually analyzing that story and noting that it comes nowhere remotely close to proving that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, those same people always forget to come back afterward and admit to me that they were wrong again.

This happens every single time, including this past Tuesday when the Guardian published a new “bombshell” report saying that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had had secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

When experts all across the political spectrum began pointing out that the story contained no evidence for its nonsensical claims and was entirely anonymously sourced, nobody ever came back and said “Hey sorry for calling you a Russian propagandist, Caitlin; turns out that story wasn’t as fact-based as I’d thought!” When evidence for a single one of the article’s claims failed to turn up for a day, then two days, then three days, nobody came back and said “Gosh Caitlin, I owe you an apology for mocking you and calling you Assange’s bitch; turns out WikiLeaks and Manafort are suing that publication and its claims remain completely unproven.”

And of course they didn’t. They weren’t meant to. They were meant to absorb the Guardian‘s false claims as fact, add it to their Gish gallop mountain of false evidence for Trump-Russia-WikiLeaks collusion, and then be shuffled onward by the relentless news churn of the corporate propaganda matrix like always. But I’m never going to let them forget that this happened, and neither should you.

Politico publishes article by CIA officer using pen name. Carl Bernstein wrote about CIA using US media in 1977:

“…400 US journalists who in the past 25 yrs have secretly carried out assignments for the CIA.”

“…full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.” pic.twitter.com/MLJnTkihj5

— J Pierpont Morgan (@pierpont_morgan) November 29, 2018

If it wasn’t obvious to you last week that there is an unelected power establishment which needs above all else to control the public narrative about what’s going on in the world, it should certainly be obvious to you this week. The Guardian hit piece was so spectacularly desperate in its over-reaching to advance a narrative which has been used to manufacture support for longtime CIA/MI6 agendas like arresting Julian Assange, stopping WikiLeaks, censoring the internet and subverting Russia that it completely exposed itself as the establishment psyop firm that it is.

If that wasn’t evidence enough, in the wake of the Guardian controversy Politico took the downright shocking step of allowing an anonymous former CIA officer to publish a lie-filled article speculating, on no evidence whatsoever, that if the story proves untrue it will be because false information was fed to the Guardian by Russia-linked operatives. The article’s anonymous author claims that there are exactly two main possibilities here:

(1) that the article is 100% true and will be vindicated, or

(2) that the article is based on disinformation which was planted in “an attempt to make [Guardian author Luke] Harding look bad.”

This is obviously absurd for two reasons. The first reason is because no Kremlin operative could possibly make Luke Harding look worse than Luke Harding did in his pathetic, fumbling attempts to argue his case for collusion while promoting his book Collusion to a less-than-sycophantic interviewer in December of last year, in which Harding grew frustrated and hung up on his own interview. The second reason is that there is another far more likely possibility than the two offered by Politico‘s anonymous spook.

My latest: The Guardian’s latest vilifying of Julian Assange without offering a shred of evidence for its claims was no mistake. It fits a pattern by the paper of damaging those who threaten to disrupt the entrenchment of the existing neoliberal order https://t.co/YiMjfOHxEh

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 28, 2018

Former Guardian employee Jonathan Cook explains that from what he learned while working at the outlet, the most likely explanation is that the editors permitted the article to be published because its anonymous sources came from within an intelligence or defense agency. As we’ve seen time and time again, from the Iraq WMD narrative to the Russian hacking narrative, western mass media outlets have a ubiquitous standing policy of printing assertions by opaque, dishonest, unaccountable government agencies as objective fact. When asked why she unquestioningly printed a false assertion that real social media users who deny any connection to Russia were Russian “bots”, the Guardian’s own political editor Heather Stewart unapologetically stated, “It’s not my analysis – as the piece makes quite clear – it’s the government’s.” As long as it comes from the government, the mass media stenographers will print what they’re told to print. But tell me more about how awful RT is because it’s “state media”.

Cook writes as follows:

“I worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.

“And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.

“That at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had ‘insurance’ on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services – presumably of Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.

“It appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at face value.”

It’s not my analysis – as the piece makes quite clear – it’s the government’s. https://t.co/50C7Ozhv8m

— Heather Stewart (@GuardianHeather) April 20, 2018

The claims made by Luke Harding and the Guardian will never be proven true, and they know it. They knowingly printed claims that they were one hundred percent aware they’d never be able to provide proof of, and the clicks their viral story generated rewarded them with a shower of cash. Their fake story was then passed along by news outlets everywhere, including an MSNBC panel which hilariously kept informing its readers that if this Guardian report is confirmed it would be the first ever actual evidence linking Trump to WikiLeaks in a meaningful way.

We must never forget that this was done. We must keep bringing up the undeniable fact that the Guardian published false claims about a longtime target of western intelligence and defense agencies, then was backed up by a longtime insider from one of those agencies who was permitted to publish anonymously in an ostensibly unrelated outlet. This is one of those jaw-dropping glimpses behind the puppet stage we must never permit the world to forget, much like the time CNN knowingly staged a fake interview with a Syrian girl reciting scripted war propaganda. We must keep bringing this up at every opportunity in our efforts to give people glimpses behind the propaganda curtain, continuing to remind them next week, next month, next year, and ten years from now.

Forgiveness is overrated. Forgiveness is a key foundational element in most abusive relationships, wherein the abusee is manipulated or bullied into forgiving the abuser again and again, without ever holding a grudge. This is true of a battered spouse, and it is true of an oppressed populace. The ability to hold a grudge is therefore of paramount importance in fighting the propaganda machine on which our rulers have built their oppressive empire. Otherwise we will be shuffled forward in the news churn, just like the goldfish-brained Russiagaters who are moved along from one false story to the next into the amnesia of the endlessly spewing news churn.

Forgiveness Is Overrated

“From the Pope down, we’ve been anesthetized with this mind-virus that in order to be good people we just put our head down, work hard, die poor, and let God do the judging. How convenient for power is that story?”https://t.co/8ONzKpc2BM

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) October 6, 2018

Don’t forget. Remember this one. Remember it, and keep bringing it up.

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